“Oh, you’re prunin’. How thick are the limbs?”
“Not very,” he said. His eyes drifted from her face to her shoulder and then down her arm, and he reached out and took hold of her left wrist, encircling it completely with his thumb and middle finger. Startled, she yanked her arm, but he had a firm grip. She opened her mouth to protest—maybe even to yell—but he bore down hard, pressing his thumb into the bony side of her wrist, and all she could do was gasp now, her eyes darting in panic, the way the rabbit’s had. “Not thick at all,” he said, smiling, raising her arm for a closer look. “Probably about like this. Maybe not quite so skinny.” He turned her forearm this way and that, examining it from various angles, still bearing down on the bone. Finally he let off, though her wrist remained firmly in his grip. “What do you recommend?”
She cleared her throat. “Well, if you’re just cutting branches,” she said, her voice strained and trembling, “a lopper might be what you want.” She pointed her free hand toward the wall at the end of the aisle. Satterfield noticed that the hand was quaking; he liked that. He raised his eyes to study her face—her eyes downcast, her posture cringing, like a chained dog about to be beaten—and then he glanced in the direction she was pointing. When he saw the assortment of long-handled pruning tools there, he released her and walked wordlessly to the wall. The woman scuttled away, rubbing her wrist, keeping a wary watch over her shoulder.
Satterfield took one of the tools from the wall and spread the handles, causing the metal jaws to gape; then, as he squeezed the handles, the jaws clamped shut. The cutting blade looked powerful and wickedly sharp, but the edge was all wrong—straight as a ruler—and he frowned and hung the tool back on the wall. He was turning to go when he noticed that there was more than one type of lopper. The one he’d inspected and rejected was an “anvil lopper,” according to the shelf tag. Satterfield puzzled over the name for a moment, then noticed that the cutting blade—the straight, sharp-edged blade that wouldn’t serve his purpose—closed against a lower jaw that was broad and flat, like a small steel chopping block. Like a little anvil, he realized. Hanging beside the anvil lopper, though, was another lopper—with a different name, a different design, and a different cutting action. This one was a “bypass lopper,” and it cut scissor fashion—the edges of the two blades sliding past one another as the handles were squeezed together. The blades weren’t straight like scissor blades, he noticed, with growing excitement. The tool’s lower jaw was blunt edged and concave, to encircle and support a branch from beneath as the upper jaw—the sharp-edged, steeply curved, convex upper jaw—sliced into the limb from above.
The bypass lopper came in three sizes. The biggest had handles as long as Satterfield’s arm; in addition, the jaws incorporated a cam to compound the handles’ leverage, multiply their force. Satterfield took the tool down from its pegs and opened and closed the handles a few times. He nodded approvingly at the metallic friction he felt; at the precision and power with which the edges slid past one another.
A selection of rakes and hoes hung on the wall a few feet away, and Satterfield walked toward them, the lopper in one hand, swaying beside his right leg. The handles of the rakes were about an inch in diameter: about the thickness of his thumb, he noticed when he held up a hand to compare. Taking a step backward, he spread the handles of the lopper wide and fitted the jaws around the wooden shaft of a rake. He closed the handles slowly, feeling for resistance—just as he’d done earlier, with the hole punch—as the concave jaw hugged the wood and the sharp edge began to bite into the layers of grain. Once the edges were well seated, he gave a smooth squeeze. The rake’s handle snapped with a dry pop, the amputated portion clattering to the floor as a razor-thin smile etched Satterfield’s face.